Monthly Archives: December 2021


GeekStuff, Windows

FIX: Widgets and Chat Won’t Open on Windows 11

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On a recent clean install of Windows 11 on a brand-new machine, I ran into an issue with two core parts of the Windows 11 experience:

  1. Widgets did not open when I clicked on the button: the icon would animate and then restore itself
  2. Chat [from the Taskbar] would sometimes open with a “We ran into an issue” or just ignore the click entirely

There was never an error message or anything in the Event Log calling out the issue – it just didn’t work. Most of the reports online were calling out issues from the pre-release versions but most of it didn’t apply to the released builds of Windows. Additionally, I’ve been running on Windows 11 for a long, long time and have never seen this issue before (and we’re talking ~300 clean installs over a period of 18 months) which left me perplexed. Given how I planned to use this machine, I shrugged and turned off the Widgets and Chat buttons on the taskbar and continued the rest of my installs.

Shortly after I put the PC into its new home, I remoted into the box and said “ah, lemme try Widgets now” and lo! I get an error message:

You need Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime

Oh ko! An error string that is searchable? I can work with that. What’s odd is that I know I had WebView2 installed at some point already because it had like nine instances running while Edge was off. I don’t think I disabled it in anyway, so that tells me some other new install must have knocked it off the box.

That said, I found an install point for the WebView2 Runtime here: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/ – after installing the x64 runtime, Widgets and Chat both began to work without issue.

Leaving this as a note to myself as much as sharing it with others.

Rant

Hey, Shithead, You’re Right!

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[MSN] “Senator Joe Manchin privately told his Senate colleagues that he believes Americans will abuse government benefits […] that parents will use child tax credit money to buy drugs and that workers will abuse the paid family leave program in the legislation to get out of work and go on hunting trips”

Hey, Shithead, you’re right! Parents often by drugs with money – be it earned or tax credit – to buy Advil and Tylenol and whatever other drugs they need to have a healthy family. Given the costs involved with health care, what did you think they would do? Steal them off the shelf at Walmart?

Personally, I love the explicit call out of a “hunting trip” – Freudian slip, perhaps, making me think old Joe has plans when the Senate is expected to be in session.